Davisville

Rosa Washington Olson grew up in the South and has lived in Davis for nearly half a century. She taught school for decades, earned advanced academic degrees, and as a public speaker she can engage people with warmth, understanding, and purpose—and challenge them with blunt facts. She grew up in a strong family amid “a time of overt racism,” she says, “but we had parents who shielded us from that hostility, and they always said to us ‘you are somebody. You will be somebody.’ ”

She has endured racism countless times, including in Davis. “Everything in the South was overt. You knew. All of the other places away from the South, hid behind the South, with their subtle, latent racism. People who went north thought they were going somewhere and realized they ran into the same kind, but in a different way.”

She also says she loves life and enjoys people, and wants to encourage, motivate and build bridges with other people. She likes Davis. The community of church is important to her (she started going to the Davis United Methodist Church in 1972). And she remains hopeful. “We are not to forget society,” she says. “It’s not an I and it’s not a me, it’s us together.”

Rochelle Swanson has seen Davis from several sides—first as a student at UC Davis, and later as a parent, a participant in various civic projects, as a business owner, and for eight years as one of the five members of the Davis City Council. She decided two terms was enough, and on today’s Davisville we talk about the city, how it has changed, economic development, how she interprets the voters' approval of the Nishi housing project this month, what she’s doing next, and more, as she leaves the council behind on July 9.

We’re short on housing, the roads are crowded, the amount of homelessness is a disgrace. How do we solve problems like these—actually solve them, not just talk about them? Starting in the 1980s, Martin Tuttle has held jobs that have allowed him to observe, address, and help fix problems in the Solano-to-Placer region, from his days as a chief aide to then-Assemblyman Tom Hannigan, to Tuttle’s current job as city manager for West Sacramento. He leaves that job in June. Today we talk about the regional identity, how the area has changed since the 1980s, what we can learn from the ways we've solved problems before ... and get his take on two of our most intractable public works problems today: transportation and the lack of housing.

With 372,000  passengers getting on or off at the our station last year, Davis is the sixth-busiest stop in California for Amtrak. Mixed among the Capitol Corridor trains that make up 98 percent of that traffic are two long-haul survivors of the Golden Age of train travel: the Oakland-Chicago California Zephyr, and the Los Angeles-Seattle Coast Starlight.

Amtrak, the federal entity that operates the passenger trains in Davis and most of the country, has a new chief executive (ex-Delta Air Lines) and has been curtailing aspects of its service—ending student discounts, reducing dining-car options on two long-distance trains back east, and cutting its ranks of ticket and baggage agents, to name three. More changes seem likely. But, and this is highly unusual in Amtrak’s 47-year-history, Washington just increased Amtrak’s budget by more than $1 billion.

To get a sense of what all this means, on today's show we talk with George Chilson, former chair of the Rail Passengers Association. He tells us why he thinks trains still matter, and says Amtrak's first priorities should be new equipment and more frequent trains—an approach that helped the Capitol Corridor succeed. (Photo shows the view from the end of the eastbound Zephyr in fall 2017, near the Utah/Colorado border.)